Enough with the misery, give me Hootie

Second semester of my freshman year, I developed mono over spring break. Even with more than one doctor’s trip, it went undiagnosed for several days as I became more and more dehydrated and thin since I couldn’t keep anything down.

As I laid on my futon bed, about all I could handle, I listened to the radio constantly. It felt like a very dark time for music: Gravity Kills, Stabbing Westward, Prodigy’s Firestarter, Marilyn Manson’s Sweet Dreams. All the songs fed into my fear that there was something really wrong with me.

Finally my doctor sent me to the hospital when I could barely walk and was sporting a temperature of 104. At the hospital I was put on an IV drip for hydration. I was so delirious those first few days, the only thing I remember was getting up to go to the restroom and dancing with my IV cart as though it was a smooth-stepping ballroom partner.

I was in the hospital for a full week after developing complications. Sometime during the process, my body stopped creating platelets, a condition known as Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP). Basically, if I received a cut, my body had no mechanism with which to clot.

When I was finally released I was handed a prescription for oral prednisone, strict instructions on rest, a list a mile long of things I couldn’t do thanks to the blood disorder and a doctor’s note excusing me from school until mid-May (the last week of classes).

For weeks I laid there sleeping and, when I had the energy, listening to the radio, getting more and more depressed as the songs were still dark and my face was puffing up from the steroids. All I wanted was to hear a happy music, songs that would lift my spirits. I finally found it in Hootie and the Blowfish’s I Only Want To Be With You. I wasn’t even a fan (I liked Hold My Hand, but that was about it), but that song was just what I needed. Something light and fluffy to carry me through. I spent my waking moments willing the song to come on.

As soon as I was able to make it up the stairs without having to lay down halfway up, I would spend the day in my parents room since I could lay down and watch tv at the same time, and it was closer to the bathroom saving me unnecessary steps. MTV was my constant - there are so many videos that now make me think of the mono days, my favorite though will always be the silly Big Bang Baby by Stone Temple Pilots and of course Hootie.

Those were the longest two and a half months of my life. And even then the recovery wasn’t complete, I stayed on the steroids for several months after and the fatigue took nearly a year to fully go away.

Despite the misery that was that time in my life, I hold a special fondness from all the songs of the period, after all, I got very used to hearing them, over and over and over...